​Washington, DC ― Michael D. Shear reports in The New York Times that President Obama on January 28 signed a presidential memorandum creating a White House task force on cancer, the first step in what Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has called a “moonshot” to cure the disease, administration officials said.

The president appointed the Vice President to lead the panel, which will include representatives from at least 13 cabinet-level departments and government agencies.

They are the Departments of Defense, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Energy, and Veterans Affairs as well as the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation, among others.

​The group’s first meeting will be on Monday, officials said.

The emotional power behind the push will come from Mr. Biden, whose son Beau died last year after a battle with brain cancer.

This month in his final State of the Union address, President Obama cited Mr. Biden’s “moonshot” comment, saying that “I’m putting Joe in charge of mission control.”

Mr. Obama pledged in the speech to initiate a government-wide push to cure the disease along the lines of the effort in the 1960s to send a man to the moon.

However, the President made no specific promises but urged Americans to believe that a cure could be found.